From NeoWiki

This article is not up to date, or it needs structural or stylistic changes to conform with the rest of this wiki. You can help the NeoOffice community by fixing it. If you do not have a NeoWiki account, please follow the steps on the New User page to request one.

N.B.This page compares NeoOffice 3.3 to LibreOffice 3.6 and Microsoft Office 2011. To see the version of this page comparing NeoOffice 3.1.1 with then-current versions of OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2008, see NeoOffice 3.1.1 Feature Comparison.

NeoOffice has many advantages over other office suites, including, in some cases, Microsoft's Office. Most importantly, NeoOffice is free and open source software, relieving you of costly licensing fees. The NeoOffice community also offers support options, including the documentation in this wiki and read-only access to the forums, where priority support is available for NeoOffice donors.

At the same time, other office suites also contain features missing in NeoOffice which may be indispensable to your work, and your purchase of commercial software generally assures the software has passed professional quality assurance and typically entitles you to professional technical support.

This page attempts to provide a balanced, but by no means complete, comparison of NeoOffice with two comprable office suites, Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, to help you make a more informed decision when evaluating office software. Some other software developers have similar comparison pages; those we are aware of are linked below.

NeoOffice vs. Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice

As an open source project, NeoOffice is free to incorporate useful code from other open source projects that corporate products often cannot use. In turn, this allows NeoOffice to react to needs of its users in ways that others are unable to match.

NeoOffice is also far more integrated with OS X than the Mac releases of LibreOffice. Rather than relying on the vision and goals of the Linux developers behind LibreOffice to determine features, NeoOffice includes many features designed specifically for Mac OS X and requested by NeoOffice donors.

Apart from these benefits, NeoOffice has features that outshine Microsoft Office and LibreOffice:

Usable with accessibility tools such as iListen, Proloquo, ViaVoice, and others

(?)

Support for the Mac OS X accessibility framework

(?)

Reads from the Mac OS X Address Book as a datasource

?

Reads from the Thunderbird Address Book as a datasource

?

Notes

* NeoOffice includes the NeoLight Spotlight Importer and the NeoPeek Quick Look importer; LibreOffice also includes a Spotlight importer. On Mac OS X 10.5, Apple includes OpenDocument Text (.odt) files in the file types natively supported by Spotlight and Quick Look.

† LibreOffice is missing support for iDisk and webdav volumes and also is missing support for using Base .odb files on any remote volume.

‡ Read-only Services are supported.

** LibreOffice is not able to successfully perform all of the "email document" functions listed in its menus.

General Features

Feature

NeoOffice 3.3

Microsoft Office 2011

LibreOffice 3.6

Type ahead word-completion (optional), similar to features found in mobile phones

A logical, safe and suite-wide system for templates, so these are never accidentally updated

Clean HTML code export (compliant with international web standards)

Support for international standard ISO 26300 OpenDocument file formats

Support for Office Open XML formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) produced by Microsoft Office 2007 and greater

*

read only

Unified User Interface, reducing learning time and costs

Optimized PDF generation

EPS preview, printing, and PDF export

(?)

†

Smoother text kerning

‡

N/A

Online document sharing service

**

UI for choosing which component appears on launch

N/A

Notes

* NeoOffice includes support for reading and writing Word 2007 (.docx), Excel 2007 (.xlsx), and PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) files using code from the ooo-build project. Office 2011 includes native support for reading and writing OpenXML file formats. LibreOffice includes support for opening these document types but not for saving them.

† LibreOffice 3.6 does not support embedding EPS files in PDF files created when using the Export as PDF function.

** NeoOffice Mobile allows users to securely share NeoOffice files with other users and other computers, publish directly from within NeoOffice, and view published documents using secure connections from regular web browsers or web-enabled mobile devices, or from NeoOffice itself. Both free and paid accounts are available; see the NeoOffice Mobile site for more information.

Internationalization and Localization

Feature

NeoOffice 3.3

Microsoft Office 2011

LibreOffice 3.6

Localized user interface and help files (number of languages)

33*

11*

24*

International spelling checkers

88†

12†

88†

Support for text entry in non-Roman scripts, including South Asian, East Asian, right-to-left and complex text layout scripts

* NeoOffice only ships with a UI for English; UIs for the other 32 languages are freely available in language packs.All versions of Office 2011 are available in Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish [2].LibreOffice 3.6 is officially available in English for Intel Macs and 23 other languages and for PowerPC in US English and 4 other languages, but unofficial versions are available in 114 different single-language builds each for PowerPC and Intel; see this list.

† NeoOffice uses the native Mac OS X spell-checker by default. If there is no native spell-checker dictionary available for a language, NeoOffice will fall back to Hunspell dictionaries. An ever-growing number of writing (proofing) tools for many languages are available from the LibreOffice project [3]. Microsoft Office 2011 ships with proofing tools for Danish, Dutch, English (US/UK/AU), Finnish, French (FR/CA), German (DE/CH), Italian, Japanese, Norwegian (NB/NN), Portugese (PT/BR), Spanish and Swedish [4].

** Because the core LibreOffice code includes support for languages and scripts which do not have keyboard layouts in Mac OS X, and because Mac OS X includes system-level Unicode support for many of these languages even though Apple does not ship fonts or keyboards, it is very likely that NeoOffice and LibreOffice will support text entry (and perhaps sorting) in the language/script if one installs third-party Unicode fonts and keyboard layouts. See Tom Gewecke's Your Multilingual Mac for more resources. For instance, there is a report that NeoOffice handles Khmer very well, and there has even been a report of using NeoOffice with characters in Unicode Planes 1 and 2.

Word Processor

Feature

NeoOffice 3.3 Writer

Microsoft Office Word 2011

LibreOffice 3.6 Writer

A logical style system that does not invent styles based on your layout choices

Performance Comparisons

Supported File Formats

NeoOffice can read and write a large variety of file formats, both current and legacy. Current and recent Microsoft Office file formats are just some of the import and export possibilities; for a more complete listing, see the NeoOffice File Formats matrix.

Still To Do

In all fairness, NeoOffice is not perfect. No software is. Along with relatively large RAM requirements (minimum 512 MB, 1 GB or more recommended), there is always room for improvement.